Nahhh, it's over fer now. They gotta vote although the union reps are telling them to reject it. I doubt they will. Nicole Termel or whatever her name is is in a no-win situation. They got the raises they wanted but a small subsection of the entire union (I think about 5000 of 90,000) will have what they call terminable allowances removed. This will in in effect result in a reduction of their salaries despite the % increase.

What's a bit scary about this at least for us rcmp folks is that we get something simliar and you know they're gonna come after our own allowance come December when our touch-point union contract is up. We follow the I/T group in government now and get varied amounts per month as well, it's about $2500 fer me dammit.

Hm... yeah I didn't know a lot of that. Terminal allowance is terminal for that exact reason. I'd like to keep it forever but do you really think we would? Especially these days where we have all kind of people having trouble getting work turning to the government the tech demand is clearly not there anymore. We've got contractors taking like 50% pay cuts to come in as TCEs. Crazy.

Getting raises isn't something I"m too used to. This is the first job I've ever had where I was around long enough to get raises. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to get pissed off at getting too little a raise every year but I"m not there yet.

So yeah they were done on Friday but we totally didn't know they would be. Came off the highway ready for the gridlock. Halden whips out his Tony Hawk game on GBA and then we just drive right into work without a problem. Sucker.

The problem I have with the term allowance they gave us was it's been around for 2 contracts at least but they also made it pensionable. That is it counts towards your pension. Not that it matters to me at this point but if that's the case it's now salary.

I don't think there's a ton of I/T people unemployed to be sure. I could be wrong I dunno. Oh sure, there's people like well, some people we hired here who are now higher up, without any real computer skills whatsoever right. Who's joined us that took a big pay cut? Only if they were working for themselves did they maybe take a 50% pay cut. That was the case with me years ago when I worked for S&S software. They would bill me out for $300-$400 a day but I didn't see any of it. They offered me a raise AFTER I said I was leaving to join the RCMP. Umm, thanks but. The only think I disliked about working for them was you were expected to take training on your own time and they didn't see it as an investment in you and hence the company. I'm somewhat concerned my own skillset is waining to be sure now. I started as a Cobol guy which may make ya laugh. Then I was Oracle-HA unix guy for a number of years which was very marketable if we all got the can but now it's been awhile really and I don't work in ITOS nor the DB group eh. Soon as the wife is commissioner I'm retiring anyway

Well there's one contractor for a certain big project that on Tuesday was celebrating that she had become a TCE and mentioned there was a big pay cut involved that was about 50%. Depends how they're hired though. If they are independantly contracted then there's no big overhead. If they're employees of the contracting company they get screwed and the company gets rich for doing essentially nothing. What a world.

Thats brings up the question why would anyone take a 50% pay cut that was still employed or was she? If you were making let's say $120,000 a year privately where you could also claim chit on your taxes too like your home office and computer would you quit for $60,000 a year? I'm not saying you wouldn't for the sake of security but I'm curious. It's hard to have the contacts to make a go of it to be sure and many private contractors use other companies to subcontract and the company takes 10-20% off the top.

So this topic has gone from strikes to money, maybe life is all about money? LOL Should that go in the other life forum?

I was surprised to hear it fo' sho'. I've never been one to put all that much importance in money. To me a stable job and good benefits, although not something I require in my current lifestyle, is certainly something I'd prefer to have over a higher paying, more stressfull and insecure job later in life should I have dependants and such. It's all about priorities I suppose.

Still this decision shocked me. If I were in an existing higher paying job Ii don't see myself taking such a drastic pay cut for the sake of job security. Maybe she was exagerating, maybe it the alternative to simply losing the contract and being unemployed. Who knows.

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